Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, a new weekly discussion that searches for the truth about psychiatric prescription drugs and mental health care worldwide.

This podcast is part of Mad in America’s mission to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care. We believe that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change.

On the podcast over the coming weeks, we will have interviews with experts and those with lived experience of the psychiatric system.

Thank you for joining us as we discuss the many issues around rethinking psychiatric care around the world.

This week on MIA Radio, we
turn our attention to Open Dialogue and we chat with
psychotherapist and Open Dialogue trainer Alita Taylor. Alita
is a licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, trainer and
facilitator based in Tacoma, Washington USA. Her passion is
working from a community-based, non-expert, need-adapted Open
Dialogue perspective, which utilizes social networks, family, and
co-facilitation with other professionals.

In this recent blog, Alita shares why Open
Dialogue ‘cannot be taught, but needs a teacher‘.

Love Is In the Air…

I am in love. I’m in love with this way of working. And I won’t
stop. Open Dialogue Washington began in 2018 upon my
graduation/commencement from Jaakko Seikkula’s dialogic approaches
to couple and family therapy trainer/supervisor training, in
collaboration with Dialogic Partners and the University of
Jyväskylä.

In 2016, I embarked to partake in the best training course I had
ever experienced as a family therapist. The embodiment I
experienced working with my Open Dialogue colleagues felt like the
missing key in psychiatry and psychotherapy. Something intangible,
yet what I knew all along. Something ineffable, yet also a shared
language. Something deeply and autonomically human, yet
unrepeatable and fleeting. It led me onto a moment-by-moment path
where everything I learned in my 27-year long career about systemic
family therapy and emergency psychiatric protocols ebbed, and the
present moment of love flowed, neither the ebbing knowledge nor the
cresting wisdom having any lesser value than the other. The
complete work we do in mental health care is this ocean of
love.

We are in constant change when we are in crisis. Timelessness
sets in. Growth is happening. We don’t exactly know what we
need. That is what mental health work is, sitting with this human
happening. In the in-between space, something happens, and we don’t
know what will. This is the paradox. We are navigating the ebb and
flow of incoming knowledge we have from research and the ebb and
flow in each patient and family’s difficulties (the meanings
they make of them).

“It cannot be taught, but it needs a teacher.”

After getting trained to facilitate and supervise Open Dialogue,
I found that this is the crux of the work, holding more than one
truth. As human beings, as a society, as mental health
practitioners, we must be able to ask what is helpful, and we must
be willing to co-provide this “help” creatively, without barriers,
between the digitized rows and columns of tick-boxes and
presumptive diagnostic menus. Remember the analog world of
dials and infinite decimals? Agency lies within ourselves to expand
the possibilities, to be willing to open to solutions that have not
yet been tried.

Michael Pohl wrote about dialogical leadership and culture in
which he referenced Karl-Martin Dietz and Thomas Kracht of the
Hardenberg Institute for Cultural Studies in Heidelberg, Germany.
Michael remembered a discussion on whether dialogism can be taught
or experienced. It was argued that the dialogic attitude cannot be
learned and that any thought of teaching it is unnecessary. Michael
disagreed. He writes, “It cannot be taught, but it needs a
teacher.”— Medium.com, March
2018.

In Helsinki and Tornio while learning the Open Dialogue
approach, I had many teachers: Jorma Ahonen, Pekka Borchers,
Birgitta Alakare, Aino Maija Rautkallio, Kari Valtanen, Tom Erik
Arnkil, Jaakko Seikkula, Tapio Salo, Tanja Pihlaja, Eija-Liisa
Rautiainen, Pekka Holm. How did they do it? To quote Birgitta
Alakare when she was asked about the beginnings of the development
of Open Dialogue in the 1980’s, “It was not only me, it was all
of us, everyone.”

When we include all the stakeholders, all the voices,
polyphonically, something extraordinary is given space to emerge.
This is challenging to enact when there are systems of health care
based on bed occupancy, lengths of stay, productivity, staff
ratios, definitions of “emergency” or “inpatient” levels of
care.

Well, Open Dialogue Washington is bringing to the fore the
question, “What is our role as helpers??” To quote Mia
Kurtti, Open Dialogue trainer of Tornio, Finland, “What are we
really doing here?”

Caring for our mental health, however defined (crises, hard
times, depression, psychosis), is a human need that varies from
moment to moment. I learn from every client and family I sit with.
In Open Dialogue, multiple perspectives are allowed, in fact
invited. Unusual experiences are uncategorized mystery, and
understanding between client and family/social network is
continuously underway. The course of schizophrenia was reversed in
Western Lapland, and their inhabitants trust their mental health
system. Hmmm… if we want to save State and Federal dollars and our
own livelihoods, perhaps we should allow ourselves to practice
psychotherapy and psychiatry with more questions than answers.
Perhaps the ones in crisis will teach us what we didn’t know. Love
is somewhere, here, in the air.

Relevant links:

About the Podcast

Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, a new weekly discussion that searches for the truth about psychiatric prescription drugs and mental health care worldwide.
This podcast is part of Mad in America’s mission to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care and mental health. We believe that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change.
On the podcast over the coming weeks, we will have interviews with experts and those with lived experience of the psychiatric system. Thank you for joining us as we discuss the many issues around rethinking mental health around the world.
For more information visit madinamerica.com
To contact us email podcasts@madinamerica.com